The Benefit of AMP:
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) was introduced by Google in 2015 as a way of improving the web page viewing experience on small mobile devices, often with slow connections and we have been struggling with it ever since.
The core promise of AMP was blisteringly fast mobile page loads. By restricting certain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and leveraging Google’s AMP Cache, pages designed with AMP were supposed to deliver content almost instantly. For a period, this speed was a significant advantage, particularly for news publishers, as Google prioritized AMP pages in its “Top Stories” carousel on mobile search results. The goal was to provide a streamlined, consistent, and exceptionally quick mobile experience, which was especially appealing in regions with less reliable internet infrastructure.
The Problems With AMP:
While the promise of speed was alluring, the reality for many WordPress site owners was often fraught with complexities, limitations, and a feeling of losing control over their own content.
Click the graphic on the right to see that, in our case Google was ignoring our instruction to use the main page as primary, and just decided it knew better by choosing to index ONLY the AMP page. This caused our page views to crater as our search rankings collapsed. We could not be more frustrated with Uncle Google telling us how to live!
This was just one of dozens of much smaller issues we faced.
One of the most significant problems stemmed from AMP’s restrictive framework. To achieve its speed, AMP heavily limited CSS, JavaScript, and various interactive elements. This meant that:
- Design and Branding Limitations: Replicating a site’s full design, branding, and user experience on an AMP page was often challenging, if not impossible. Many AMP versions looked stripped-down and generic, sacrificing visual appeal and brand consistency.
- Functionality Loss: Interactive features like complex forms, animations, specific widgets, and some third-party integrations simply wouldn’t work on AMP pages without significant workarounds or being excluded entirely. This could lead to a degraded user experience compared to the main site.
- Maintenance Overhead: Forcing publishers to maintain two distinct versions of their content – the standard HTML page and the AMP version – introduced significant maintenance overhead. This meant double the testing, potential for inconsistencies, and a higher chance of errors. As highlighted by Pagely.com, “This double maintenance has been one of the biggest reasons to not adopt AMP.”
- URL Issues and Canonicalization Headaches: As our experience showed, managing canonicalization and ensuring Google indexed the preferred version of a page was a constant struggle. Despite best practices, Google sometimes seemed to favor the AMP version, leading to confusing analytics and SEO nightmares.
- Perceived Loss of Control: The fact that Google effectively cached and served AMP pages from its own domain (google.com/amp) made many feel a loss of direct control over their content and analytics.
- Diminishing SEO Returns: While AMP was initially a strong signal for the “Top Stories” carousel, Google’s shift in May 2021 to prioritize Core Web Vitals for this feature significantly eroded AMP’s unique SEO advantage. Now, any well-optimized, responsive, non-AMP page that meets Core Web Vitals can achieve the same visibility. This pivotal change removed the primary incentive for many to endure AMP’s limitations.
Better Alternatives To AMP
Over time, advancements in web development practices – such as responsive design, robust caching solutions, image optimization, lazy loading, and efficient code – made it possible to achieve excellent page load speeds and mobile experiences without the need for AMP’s restrictive framework. Themes like Hestia Pro, for instance, are built to be fast and responsive out of the box, often outperforming the general benefits of an AMP version for overall user experience and SEO.
Scrap AMP?
While AMP aimed to solve a real problem (slow mobile web), its implementation often created new headaches for site owners, ranging from design compromises and maintenance burdens to complex SEO issues. With Google’s evolving focus on holistic page experience metrics, the compelling reasons to adopt and maintain AMP for most WordPress sites have largely evaporated, making it a fading solution in the modern web landscape.
So the the short answer is no, AMP is no longer a benefit to most WordPress sites and should be removed if you are still running it.
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